Using encryption

Dan Goodin at The Register has a very timely article recommending that everyone encrypt their email.

If you think that at any point in the next ten years you might want to send or receive an email message that can't be read by your ISP, your government, the US government, or a lawyer, then the time to start using PGP-compatible encryption is now.

The reasons for this are:


I came to the conclusion a few days ago, dusted off all my old keys, found that they'd all expired (fortunately, since I'd forgotten passphrases), and created some new ones. I posted a key for sending to this blog, and if you have my personal email address, there is a key for that on the MIT keyserver.

So, if you're using Windows, read the Register article; if you're on Linux, install gnupg and enigmail (I'm on Debian and the packaged Thunderbird comes automatically with Enigmail to integrate with gnupg - just turn it on), even if you use webmail, there is now a firefox extension FireGPG to make it easy to send and receive encrypted messages.

So invest a couple of hours now in being ready.

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